In semiconductor manufacturing, plasma is often employed to create and assist surface chemistry within a plasma reactor necessary to remove material from and deposit material to a substrate. In general, plasma is formed within the plasma reactor under vacuum conditions by heating electrons to energies sufficient to sustain ionizing collisions with a supplied process gas. Moreover, the heated electrons can have energy sufficient to sustain dissociative collisions and, therefore, a specific set of gases under predetermined conditions (e.g., chamber pressure, gas flow rate, etc.) are chosen to produce a population of charged species and chemically reactive species suitable to the particular process being performed within the chamber (e.g., etching processes where materials are removed from the substrate or deposition processes where materials are added to the substrate). One pre-requisite to ensuring a uniform process includes a uniform injection of process gas to the plasma chemistry above the substrate. FIG. 1 presents a showerhead-type gas injection system 1 comprising a gas injection assembly body 10, a gas inject plate 12, and optionally one or more baffle plates 14 installed within gas injection plenum 16. In general, the gas injection assembly body 10, the gas inject plate 12, and the one or more baffle plates are fabricated from aluminum. The process gas can be supplied to the gas injection plenum 16 via a mass flow controller 30 and/or pressure regulator 32 In order to minimize the damage sustained by exposure to the processing plasma, a consumable or replaceable component can be inserted within the processing chamber to protect the surfaces of more valuable components that would impose greater costs during frequent replacement. Therefore, the gas injection system 1 depicted in FIG. 1 can further comprise a consumable gas inject plate 20. The consumable gas inject plate 20 can be fabricated from materials such as silicon, quartz, sapphire, alumina, carbon, silicon carbide, etc. In general, it is desirable to select surface materials that during erosion minimize the introduction of unwanted contaminants, impurities, etc. to the processing plasma and possibly to the devices formed on the substrate. As a result of their consumable nature, the erosion of exposed components in the plasma processing system can lead to a gradual degradation of the plasma processing performance and ultimately to complete failure of the system. Therefore, it is important to properly maintain these components. For instance, these consumables or replaceable components are typically considered as part of a process kit that is frequently maintained during system cleaning. In manufacturing environments, consumable components, such as the consumable gas inject plate 20, are replaced during pre-determined maintenance intervals, which are often dictated by a measure of usage such as the number of RF hours. Since the measure of usage is determined conservatively, consumable components can be replaced before the end of their lifetime, hence, leading to increased manufacturing costs, downtime, etc.